My HP laptop is less than a year old, I have a great warranty plan, however, I am in the Navy and will be at sea for months to come.

I am not sure if this is the appropriate place for this post but if anyone has suggestions I would appreaciate it very much. My play the HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GWA-4082N plays and writes DVDs with the best of them. When I insert a CD no matter what format it will not recognize the disk, no error messages just the light falsshing for a while and then it turns off.

My intial thoughts and what I have done so far.

I deleted my drivers for my DVD/CDR and rebooted with no resolve. I wonder if it could be a registry problem? I am not very good with regedit and usually prefer to not mess with it. I am considering backing up the autoexec and config sys files and then remove all CD info and try rebooting. From my searches so far online it seems that I may have to just purchase an external drive and use it.

I hope some one has suggestions, being that this is a relatively new computer and drive I expect there will be many more of these posts or posts like it.

Sounds like a lemon, but you could try updating the firmware to see if you have any luck... Here is a link to The Firmware Page... Search around there... looks like there is only one available for your drive.